Il figliuol prodigo

There isn't a whole lot to add that hasn't already been said previously.The film does drag,the plot is labored,and,for all of the spectacle,most of the cast look as though they would rather be doing something else.I have to disagree,very slightly,with one observation made by the most recent reviewer.Purdom's Micah,is,of course,a fool,a dupe,an ingrate,and a chump of the first order.My thought is,why did they have someone of his age playing the character?He appears to be playing a character of his own chronological age.And,any 30-year old man who is taken to the cleaners the way Micah is,has left himself wide open for this kind of exploitation.It might have made more sense(and a more believable film)if Micah had been played by a late-adolescent,who had never been away from home before,rather than a mature traveler and merchant.Take this for whatever it happens to be worth.

Lana Turner was pure magic, emotion and sensation in her long walk through the temple of love... And "The Prodigal" will remain the best showcase ever equipped for her excellent figure... The film is M.G.M.'s entry in the CinemaScope Bible race...

Lana was cast as Samarra, the lightly-clad temptress who incited history's first juvenile delinquent to leave home…

The film was based on the Biblical story of the prodigal son as told by St. Luke in Chapter XV of his gospels… There, in fewer than 300 words is the bare suggestion of a youth who "wasted his substance in riotous living," later to return, repentant to farm and father…

The screenplay portrayed the prodigal as Micah (Edmond Purdom), the model son of a Hebrew patriarch named Eli (Walter Hampden). As the film begins he has honored his father by becoming engaged to Ruth (Audrey Dalton), a gentle girl of his own faith…

While visiting Damascus, however, the youth enters the tent of Samarra, the high priestess of Astarte, goddess of the flesh, and he is dazzled by her beauty… To his father's bitter dismay, he demands his share of the family fortune, leaves his fiancée on the eve of their marriage, and goes off to the city in pursuit of the pagan woman, whose duties include presiding over human sacrificial rites…

Among the fleshpots of Damascus, Micah's uncontrollable infatuation for the priestess plunges him into a variety of mishaps… He is victimized by Nahreeb (Louis Calhern), the sinister high priest of Baal, who conspires to destroy him for his irreverent interest in Samarra; by Bosra (Francis L. Sullivan), an unscrupulous moneylender; and even by Samarra herself, who withholds her love until he produces a certain valuable pearl as a gift for her goddess

Even when they weren't very good, those widescreen Biblical epics of the 1950's were usually "fun" in a campy sort of way. This leviathan from MGM piles on the lavish sets and costumes but manages to evoke little more than polite boredom mixed with the occasional snicker. There's no historical atmosphere here -- everything is "soundstage" -- and there's no chemistry between its leading man and leading lady. Some worthy players do pop up in the supporting cast -- Louis Calhern, Cecil Kellaway, Joseph Wiseman, etc. -- but they're usually stuck in silly headdresses which look like overturned wastebaskets. James Mitchell probably delivers the liveliest performance in the movie and he plays a mute! Poor Edmund Purdom. He starred in 20th's biggest production of 1954, "The Egyptian" -- after Marlon Brando turned down the part -- and then starred in this, MGM's biggest production of 1955, and yet this almost unprecedented, one-two whammy of multimillion dollar spectacles failed to ignite his acting career. This is puzzling inasmuch as he was a good-looking fellow with a fine voice and real acting talent but perhaps the cold, cynical nature of his two major roles kept audiences from warming to him. He soon wound up in Italian B-movies. The flogging he suffers while chained in a dungeon in "The Prodigal" did, however, win him a bit of unexpected honor. It ranks 66th in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies."

A sadly boring spectacle of a biblical film, even though almost all the production values are of a high quality (except that special effect vulture). The script and direction of are simply too bland for the story, but more importantly we simply do not care about the character, and most of them are rather unsympathetic. The one redeeming performance is that of Frances L. Sullivan - and this was his last film. He deliciously adds something to each of the scenes he is in, whereas Edmund Purdom gives little throughout the film. Lana Turner is beautiful, but not sensual and her character seems too undefined to be really intriguing -that is until her demise. It is interesting to see a film such as this, where no expense has been spared, with great MGM art direction and costume design, intriguing choreography and movement, the then novel CinemaScope cinematography, and realizing fairly quickly that is simply does not hold. The above mentioned factors prevent it from being utterly boring, but my overall reaction is one of disappointment.

I recall that Senator Estes Kefauver made a great deal of political hay out of his holding up to (self-)righteous scorn the publicity campaign for this lavish five million dollar spectacle. Lana, featured in one of her more strategically beaded creations, was front and center in several of the advertisements used to promote this next-to-last of her M-G-M contract obligations. The Senator did his best to bring the studio to its knees over this blatant exploitation of (gasp!) sex in what was, after all, thinly veiled titillation, designed to unglue the American hoi polloi from its presumably chaste TV screens. (How he must have gloated when several theater owners had the lobby posters retouched to show somewhat less of the Luscious Lana!) Other comments about this one are pretty much "right on" but the Senator's fulminations were far more revealing of his hypocrisy than anything Lana was required to enact as the High Priestess Samarra. How little has changed in Washington, D.C. to this very day. Sometimes I think that politicians distract us more successfully than the most skilled artists of the cinema!